Jocelyn Lengen, Johnaliz Batista Pizarro, Siyu Wang, Shakira Uculmana
Our study seeks to determine how identity differences relate to one’s emotional eating behaviors and comfort food preferences at Muhlenberg College. We hypothesize that participants with a larger course load will exhibit higher levels of perceived stress, hopelessness, pandemic-related perceived stress, and emotional eating, and thus lower levels of coping. Participants who rated themselves higher on the socioeconomic scale will exhibit higher levels of coping; participants who rated themselves lower on the socioeconomic scale will exhibit lower levels of coping, and exhibit higher levels of pandemic-related perceived stress and hopelessness. Finally, participants who identified as female will exhibit higher levels of emotional eating, perceived stress, pandemic-related perceived stress, and hopelessness; participants who identified as male will exhibit lower levels of emotional eating, perceived stress, pandemic-related perceived stress, and hopelessness. Ultimately, this study aims to create awareness of multiple elements that may elevate perceived stress factors and highlight maladaptive coping mechanisms.
This was extremely interesting to think about the fact that so many people went through this struggle with using comfort food as a way to address their emotions
What a fascinating study! I definitely think this has a lot of practical applications and would be important information to know if we were to have another stress inducing event like a pandemic.
This was very interesting and definitely represents the students of Muhlenberg during this pandemic. This can be generalized to a larger population and the information can be used for other difficult time that are likely to come.
This study is so interesting! I think that this topic is super important when studying the impacts of the pandemic, and can be really beneficial for future studies as well. Using multiple different scales gave you a great range of evidence to use and draw conclusions from, which allowed us to see that one scale was not more biased over the others.